By Gill Pringle
Despite the demons, Jack Black is still happy to be king of the kids, with some of his family friendly flicks – Kung Fu Panda, The School Of Rock, Nacho Libre – rating amongst the actor’s most popular. “I don’t approach those movies any differently than I do with my others,” Black says of his kids’ flicks. “But the challenge is always to be funny without using bad language. I found that to be a great exercise in performance, because that can really be a crutch. I’ve been guilty of overusing the F-bombs in my other projects. But my best film to date, in my opinion, is The School Of Rock, and that had zero profanities. It was the same with Nacho Libre. Kids like funny things in the same way that adults do. That’s a common mistake that people make with kids’ movies. They’ll try to dumb down the comedy to bring it down to the apparrently ‘low IQ’ of children. That’s a mistake. Children laugh at funny things.”
And Jack Black, meanwhile, isn’t averse to shedding a few tears. “I cry a lot with movies,” the actor admits. “I don’t find it very easy to cry in real life or on film. But when I see something in a movie – it doesn’t even have to be that sad – I just burst into tears. Whenever I see heroism, for instance, I start crying. In Captain America: The First Avenger, when the young scrawny Captain America – before he gets the serum to make him super – is in boot camp and someone throws a fake grenade out and he jumps on top, a couple of tears squeezed out of my eyes. It’s very embarrassing.”
And finally, with Goosebumps, were there any actual unexplained scary happenings on the set? “Of course,” Jack Black smiles mischievously. “There were all sorts of unexplained happenings. There were books flying off shelves…lots of scary stuff. That’s what you have to say on any scary movie to generate bogus buzz, right? I’m sorry that I didn’t prepare my bogus haunting stories,” Black laughs.
Goosebumps is released in cinemas on January 14.
